


the years start coming (and they don't stop coming)

by rainbowagnes



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Backstory, Crimea - Freeform, Developing Relationship, Found Family, Genoa, Medieval Flashbacks, Multi, Music, Nicky's questionable sense of fashion, Pop Culture, Road Trips, Sunflowers, The Future, birthday gifts, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25716238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: a collection of drabbles + prompts for the old guard7)  portraitFrom the prompt by @dreaming-in-circles - " That was the first time Joe drew Nicky’s face, but the second time was much more interesting."---Wanted. FILTHY FRANK- VENETIAN, Yusuf scribbles, purposefully making a few spelling errors for authenticity's sake. A LARGE NUMBER OF DIRHAMS FOR THE MAN, DEAD OR ALIVE.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nile Freeman & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 30
Kudos: 256





	1. essential listening

**Author's Note:**

> From @howmanyhyperfixation 's great prompt on tumblr for "Nile and another member of the Old Guard discussing some form of pop culture. (Unrelated but I feel like Joe would go really hard for Star Wars while simultaneously calling all other sci-fi nerdy and bad.)" Thank you so much for this prompt and I hope you enjoyed the drabble. 
> 
> (Apologies to all for the music being mentioned being pretty anglophone centric. HOWEVER some are references to events on copley's board) 
> 
> Here's the link to the spotify playlist with every single song/artist mentioned. It's 1 hr 46 mins rather than 9 hours but u can just skip through to see where the snippets come from.  
> https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2vgm9p6GtB7RQvxGXmrZ16?si=9XgxP3q2TW-PJjJK7kLL6g

Joe wanted to do a cassette, but Nile talked him into a Spotify playlist, and by the time they’ve compiled the bare essentials in the last three hundred years of music, shuffled into a vaguely chronological order, the playlist stretches into the six hour mark. Wild how what was once pop culture can become, if canonised, a classic worthy of academic attention, Nile thinks as she slots in Frank Ocean after Fairuz and Fabrizio De André, wonders how the music of her own time will go down the years- although there’s long been a power attached, even in the long term, to whiteness, maleness. Put a white face on the record cover and that’s the version that hits the top one-hundred. It’s the original version of Universal Soldier by Buffy Sainte-Marie Nile adds to the list, rather than the one most people seem to know, the cover by Donovan. Odetta’s God’s Gonna Cut You Down over Cash’s. 

Joe has his own opinions, additions, Souad Massi and Donna Summer and Bruce Springsteen and the Star Wars opening theme which, Nile argues back, is pointless without the context of Star Wars itself, which when they’ve tried to explain it to Quỳnh has caused more confusion than the actual moon landings or satellite TV. But how much music exists without the context of its time? Nile flicks through the list. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the lord. It ain’t me, it ain’t me, I aint no senator’s son. Una mattina, mi son svegliato, e ho trovato l’invasor. We shall overcome. Go tell the rambler, the gambler, the backbiter, tell ‘em the almighty’s gonna cut ‘em down.  


Nile looks to where Quỳnh’s wiping down her set of 11th century Damascene watered steel knives with nail polish remover while she dedicatedly watches the tv, eyes swallowing news, history, turns of phrase and culture. It feels presumptuous and strange, in a way, to be doing this, three hundred years to a woman who’s seen five thousand, has known and forgotten more ballads and lullabies and folk songs than Spotify has on its server. Music is language is context, and how could she, even Joe and Nicky, ever even vaguely understand the worlds that wrote those songs? Quỳnh, like Andy, came millenia before "quel Nazzareno," before "the man from Galilee," although Nile’s never asked either of them about it, not sure if she really wants the answers. 

“Cálice, Chico Buarque and Milton Nascimento.” Nicky says when he returns, and she adds it, a song with context if there ever was one. “Cancion por el Fusil y la Flor. Mercedes Sosa.” He hands her breakfast, a salteña and a cup of hot, sweet coffee, and organises away his other findings with a military efficiency: medical gauze, unmarked magazines, a fresh pair of cheap-ass plastic sunglasses for Joe. Nicky calls out other suggestions. Má vlast. Sinnerman. Arturo Márquez - Danzón No. 2. Goran Bregović. They never take any songs off the playlist, only add others on. Seven hours, eight. “Essential” means something different to everyone on earth. “Exactly how much Sanremo did Joe suggest be put on there? Oh, and add the Star Trek theme.”

Andy returns from scouting while Joe’s replacing the lisence plate on the car. Nile downloads the whole thing onto a freshly air-gapped phone. She needs to stop ribbing on Joe’s old-man cassette-and-tape-deck ways, or Nicky’s even-older-man preference for vinyls- at least those don’t come with the threat of a digital footprint, the chance of being caught over some road trip jams. Joe packs everything into the trunk of the car while Nile checks the route and writes down the key highways and intersections onto a napkin. Maybe it’s a universal in all families, even immortal ones, that the youngest person gets to be the navigator when digital maps are involved. She gets to ride shotgun, at least, climb in in front next to Nicky. He’s absentmindedly tapping out a melody on the steering wheel. She doesn’t recognise it. 

“My education begins,” Quỳnh says from the back. She always has a glint of humour in her eyes, a joke- Nile can never quite tell when she’s being sardonic or serious. Nicky pulls away from the curb. Nile queues up the playlist. Hadyn’s Cello Concerto in C. And then the Star Wars Cantina Band song. Maybe she didn’t do quite as good a job at organising things as she thought she did. Nine hours, final cut- long enough to make it over the border to Peru, at least, allowing for some pauses for periodic arguing over directions, getting lost, and roadside snacking. 

“Yeah.” Nile presses play. “Let’s get started.”


	2. the mouse

Nicky’s basically the opposite of vain, probably the most modest person Joe’s ever met in that he doesn’t actually advertise his lack of care in appearance.  


He grows out his hair until it looks pirate-y, “and not in a good way,” and then he shaves it all off again and lets the cycle repeat. He gets enough clothes to last a while off the Old Navy or Castro or Primark clearence racks and wears those until they’re worn beyond function or run through with blood stains and bullet holes that even Joe’s considerable skill with baking soda, and hotel sewing kit cannot repair. He’s picked up modern preferences for tshirts, jeans, hoodies, vaguely middle aged looking fleeces marked with sports teams or national parks, but he’s always been like this, always preferred the simple comfort of the thawb and igal of an Arab traveller to the heavy silks and brocades of the Ottoman courts or the sculpted, architectural finery of the Renaissance. He’s got a sniper’s temperament, or a priest’s- it just depends on who you ask. A crowd can provide just as much c over as a mountain, and Nicky likes to be able to pull his hood up around his face and blend in, become the unseen.  


“He thinks you’re a mouse, Nicky,” Joe will say, and it’s a joke, almost, because of the thousand poor souls who’ve come to the same conclusion before him and had it be the last mistake they’d ever made.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my hot take on the luca marinelli hair discourse going down on tumblr because none of us are getting outside enough in these trying times


	3. nile speaks russian (part one) - sunflowers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was supposed to be like. two sentences before a longer fic that includes one of the only serious pieces of info we know about the Sycthians but it got longer and i really like the more removed outsider perspective/ambiguity of it, SO. 
> 
> I am not Crimean Tatar or Muslim, and I speak neither Russian nor Tatar, and I really hope the cultural and religious aspects here are accurate. 
> 
> SPOILERS BUT Trigger warning for MAJOR character death

The last thing Teyfuq Mustafayev expects, as he puts the coffee on and slices bread and cheese for his still-sleeping wife Ayshe on a morning still with the promise of the Hot Season that will soon crackle his farm dry, is an American girl with a crumpled pile of hyrvina bills in her hands that he knows at a glance are worth more than his son Murat earns at his engineer’s job in Sevastopol, perfect Muscovite Russian in her mouth, and death in her eyes. Her Russian words are perfect but carry a heaviness to them, every syllable as if tied down to rocks. 

“Подсо́лнечник,” sunflower, she calls. She stands at the outer fence of his property, and with his bad vision Teyfuq has to hunt for his glasses before he can walk out to see her at the gate. 

“How much would you charge for your sunflowers?” 

The question trips him up a bit. Teyfuq knows exactly how much he would charge for the sunflowers that stretch over his entire holding- but by the ton, by the kilo, in dealings with companies that truck the flower heads off to be processed into oil and halva. He has a feeling this girl does not want to buy an entire kilo of sunflowers, only an armful. 

He looks down. Thick soles heavy Vet-Tech patented material, dark. Solderi’s boots, not workingman’s boots, not farmer’s boots, and when he was a child his father told him to fear those with soldier’s boots, a lesson learned through generations at gunpoint. It’s a lesson that has served Teyfuq well over the years in keeping his farm and family out from under the treads of tanks, and here is an American with money in her pockets now held out in her hands, and he feels nothing but for the sorrow in her eyes, and he asks her “how many do you want,” and when she says a bouquet, an armful, he tells her that it will cost nothing at all, and not to leave without a cup of strong dark tea and toast. She does not seem inclined to follow him, makes a comment about the time, about where she has to be, but he asks please, humour him, it has been so long since he and his wife have had company, fresh faces, and they miss their son who is her age most terribly but he these days in the city, and finally says yes, for a short time. Ayshe is awake when they walk in and she rushes to put more coffee on and then make the girl pancakes with melted butter and sour-cherry preserves, and the girl’s Russian is fluent, perhaps ridden through with words and cadences that Teyfuq would associate with stuffed-up local politicians trying to imitate the youth and falling by decades than someone her age, but it must just be that’s the sort of person who’s taught her russian, but the moment that really stuns them both is when she responds to Tatar, Tanışuıbızğa şatmım, a sudden OH, Tatarça söyläşäsezme? From Ayshe, an äye, azraq gına. 

Why have you come to Crimea? Ayshe asks, more curious than probing, and the girl swirls the remains of her coffee with a small spoon and says, for my grandmother. 

Your grandmother was from Crimea? 

A very, very long time ago. She was very old. We took her back to her homeland before she died. She had lost a lot of her memory. We- the family- we wanted her to look at her oldest memories. Horses. The wind here. The fields. 

There are tears at the corner of her eyes, and Teyfuq suddenly feels he has done a terrible evil by inviting her in for breakfast when she has so very much to grieve, but she must eat, and as heavy as the words are, she eats readily, and must have been hungry. 

For indeed it is to Allah we belong, Teyfuq quotes, and is surprised when the girl joins him, finishes the ayah, and it is to Allah we return. 

Thank you, the girl says. You have been very kind. 

Oh sweetheart, Aysha both sighs and smiles, and Teyfuq knows she is thinking of her own mother, the funeral a year and a half ago and still fresh in their hearts, it is our pleasure to meet such an interesting stranger who speaks such good tatarça, and our sadness as to what has brought you to Crimea. May God smile with mercy upon your grandmother’s soul. 

Teyfuq goes out into the sunflower fields that run all the way up to the farmhouse to cut the most generous bundle of flowers the girl can carry easily, knowing now, without her saying, that they will go above a freshly dug grave. He offered to drive her back into town, but she strongly refused, said she could walk back to her grandmother’s land herself. He finds the tallest stalks and cuts them generously, then wraps the stems in damp and then dry newspapers and rubber bands. Makes sure the girl knows his and Ayshe’s holonumbers and address, should she need anything again. In grief all strangers are kin, he says, and even in life, we are not meant to walk alone.  
Thank you, she says, you have been too kind.  
Ayshe wraps a chunk of the good sunflower-seed halva they made this year for her for the road. Here, she says, taps the holophoto of Murat, you must be our son’s age. School picture, curly hair neatly slicked back, class of 2067. 

Yeah she says, he’s a year older than me. Her eyes catch at a different photo on the shelf, one of a grandmother an uncountable number of greats back posed with some foreign soldiers during a war, and he’s about to answer her, talk about the miracle of this woman’s survival, when she swallows heavily and thanks them again for their kindness and walks out the door again.  
She carries so much time on her shoulders for someone so young, Ayshe says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you liked this i ended up stretching it out and adding about another 2k of material on in my seperate fic "kurgan" that's also on ao3


	4. cadeau

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 4) cadeau  
> 5 + 1 prompt from @mockingjaypin: "He's rifling through their drawers when the notebook falls out and hits the floor."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warnings for alcohol, this being more than five sentences, and the fact i didn’t feel like doing math on how old booker actually is

Marrakech is a disaster from the beginning, when Booker digs through his stuff, finds no money aside from his freshly aquired 500 euros, realises he must have left the wad of cash from the Thessaloniki airport exchange in the bar he’d gotten today’s round of day-drinking started in after his morning check-in-slash-i-have-your-balls-in-a-vice-if-you-sell-out-or-try-any-funny-business call with Copley, and has to ask Joe and Nicky if they have any spare Moroccan dirhams. 

“Yeah, sure,” Joe says, distracted from where he, Andy, and Nicky are all engrossed in a local darija language soap that everyone but Booker can understand, eyes focused on the drama on screen while, respectively, they fix up spy-agency level equiment, recalibrate the bearings on a sniper rifle, and clean an axe. “Second drawer down on the dresser, left, there’s a role of them. Get lunch if you’re out.” 

He’s rifling through their drawers when the notebook falls out and hits the floor. Joe’s sketchpad, and he’s about to slam it shut when he notices a string of french on the bottom right hand corner, underneath a drawing of Nicky napping under a pomegranite tree. numéro de confirmation, a date that would be Booker’s two hundred and fourty third, and a tiny offhand doodle of stick figures that are recognisably be Booker and Joe kicking a football. Booker knows without saying that in the ridiculous other Schrodinger’s world in which what is going to happen in Sudan does not happen in Sudan, he’s gonna find an overpriced OM jersey, a set of tickets, and some kind of ridiculous comment about how a man’s only two hundred and fourty three once in his life, waiting for him at the end of it, because you can only pull a trick like that so many times in you life, and Joe and Nicky are going to be smiling like they’re the smoothest fucking secret keepers on earth, and actually, Booker needs to get something stronger to drink right fucking now.

He lets the door slam on his way out, without asking for anyone’s lunch order.


	5. pit viper

Andy walks out of the Autogrill with half a cornetto shoved between her teeth and a long series of instructions about the Audostrada closure that are probably not correct banging around her head, and the sudden flash of impossibly bright sun blinds her for a moment as she tries to dig her sunglasses out of her pocket. 

“Hello, summerwind,” says a voice in an endearment from a language four and a half thousand years forgotten by anyone alive but them, and Andy nearly chokes on the cornetto, starts hacking profusely at the sight of her. Because yes, in fucking theory she knew that Quỳnh was out there, and working with Booker somehow, and fucking pissed as hell, and she fucking heard her on the phone and saw her in the chaos of that last shootout, but here she fucking is, in the flesh, legs hooked over an incredibly glossy, expensive, fast-looking Italian motorcycle, sun in her face and wind blowing her hair out behind her. She smiles, all sunglasses. “Sexy as ever.” 

There is a lot going through Andy’s head right now. Instead she gestures to the motorcycle, onto which Quỳnh has already gotten a stylised pit viper design emblazoned. 

“You’ve sure adapted fast. Didn’t think this was quite your style, though.” 

Her lips twist upward in a look Andy would once have ascribed to buried laughter at one of their thousand inside jokes. 

"Come on, it's the 21st Century, when is the last time you actually needed to ride a horse?" She pats the seat behind her seat. “Come with me if you want to live.” 

Andy pauses. Nile and Joe and Nicky are all arguing with a mechanic about how to fix a Pandino from the 80′s that’s blown another fuse and Andy knows they won’t be done until lunchtime, at least, and also that she only has one extremely breakable life, and that being tracked down to a side street by the former and in fact current love of her life to an utterly generic postwar side street when said former/current love of her life is on some kind of well-deserved vengeance mission should scare the shit out of her, and in fact she is feeling very real fear right now, but she’s feeling an awful lot of other things too, and one of them is that Quỳnh is unimaginably fucking hot in a white buttondown unbuttoned halfway down and smear of cherry-red lipstick and that she hasn’t done anything dangerous and dumb in centuries and that if she has only got one short life left, she might as well use it well. So she texts a quick message to Nile and then climbs on.


	6. dunde ne vegnì duve l'è ch'ané

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t talk much, as a child. In fact, he barely talks at all for the first few years of his life, and it takes him several more lifetimes to find the words that need saying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so if you know me on tumblr @tovezza there was a shift a few days ago when i was talking to a friend about how i pictured nicky's childhood and realising how much i projected my own childhood on it and then.... record scratch.... i, an autistic person, realised also very much read nicky as autistic, and have since i saw him on screen the first time even if i didn't outright realise it THEN, and that's definitely intimately woven in with how i see him and his view of the world. and there's been a lot of talk about this on my tumblr since then, and this snippet ended up getting quite personal, for that reason. 
> 
> like sunflowers, this might get expanded outward into a longer fic, if i have time + inclination
> 
> the title is from "CREUZA DE MÄ" by fabrizio de Andrè, and while THAT is in (modern) genoan/zeneize language, the linguistic stuff in this is, tragically, modern italian.

He doesn’t talk much, as a child. In fact, he barely talks at all for the first few years of his life, and it takes him several more lifetimes to find the words that need saying. Most people, he learns, never do. Tra il dire e il fare c'è di mezzo il mare., he’ll learn in the language eight hundred years out from being a gangly, chronically hungry child in the streets of Genova, but between talking and speaking is also a sea even wider than the one that is his home land just as much as the city, and between speaking and listening- the world. And who, ever, really, truly, understands? Nicolo doesn’t, and he’s been working on it for centuries. 

This is what Nico does understand - the world has many languages. The language of his fingers running along the cold dappled stones of the base of houses as he chases his brothers and is chased. The language of water drawn up in buckets from the well, the cold against his fingers sharp and stabbing like birdsong, loud, or, worse, summer water, warm and slow, sluggish like the dogs curled at the steps of their building. The interconnected dialects of his mother’s kitchen, where he spends most of the earlier years of his life, trailing after her and grabbing at the soft cloth of her skirts, watches her hands move over the daily tasks until he can copy most of them without her telling him too. Scooping dried peas out from the bag to soak overnight in the cold clay bowl, pealing the garlic and most of all, watching the fire, pulling it up alive again every morning from where the embers sleep at night, cozy under a thick blanket of ash, feeding the hungry flames during the day and watching them to make sure they remain level with the cooking pot, banking them down under the ashes before he goes to sleep. He likes the cooking fire, which, if you listen closely enough, speaks, tells you of wood that’s been cured and dried or wood that’s still damp and will sputter and spark, like the fire that contains the world in its flickering flames curling into endless different shapes. 

There’s a day when the sparks are slow to catch on the fresh kindling, lazy like his older brothers on a Sunday, and he says in the same angry, disapproving voice his mother has used on them a thousand times, “svegliati. Per favore,” svegliati.” The words seem right, all the svv sv sounds like smoke, t t t like crackling sparks, and fire wakes up and lives. and at night before he banks the coals and washes his face at his turn with the basin and says his prayers and smoothes down his corner of the bed he shares with four of his siblings, he whispers, the shape of words themselves odd in his mouth, “buona notte.” Thinks: you’d better say your prayers, or the Devil will come. 

And maybe the fire didn’t say their prayers, because he’s six when a big storm rolls up off the water and into the city, bigger than any he’s ever known in his life, and the board their doors and pile bags of sand in the entryways and wedge rags into all the seams of windows and still the water rushes in, making everything cold and damp. Dark. Hiding from the sound of thunder with his siblings, blanket pulled over their heads, he thinks- i cannot wake the fire today. where will the fire be without me? but the fire lived before you spoke, and will be fine. 

When the storm sputters itself out and they all come out blinking like newborn kittens into the light and everyone is trying to make sure everyone else is alive and how much it will be to fix the roof, Nico rushes to the fire, already feeling some part of his heart what he already knows to be true. The ashes have been utterly drenched, soaked all the way to the brick floor, water everywhere. Not a trace of warmth left no matter how hard he looks. Dead. Dead. That’s the only word he can reach for. Gone, like two of the older siblings he never knew, gone like the nonna he can barely remember. Something inside him breaks, and his tears are soon soaking the ashes too. 

His father looks surprised more than angry. He’s gone long days out on the water with the older boys, has expressed his concern, a few times, that a boy who prefers watching the hearth to grappling in the street will not learn to stand as a man, but mostly doesn’t seem to know him much at all. But he sees him there and sits down next to him. 

“We never forget what it looks like the first time we look Death in the face,” his father tells him. “And then we carry Death with us all our lives, until we meet him again, as all things do. It is about learning to live in our time so that we may be happy when we do.” 

Nico nods. He should not feel sad, morning the ashes, not when he has been to so many funerals in his life, usually of people he does not know how should know, but he still wants to send them off. Ashes to ashes, he thinks, like a proper priest. But what if you have always been ashes? He laughs at that. His father looks even more puzzled. 

“When the waters have calmed” he says “I will take you out on the boat with me, so you can learn the trade. We will see how you meet the sea.”


	7. portrait

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> from a prompt by @dreamingincircles on tumblr who prompted the sentence ": That was the first time Joe drew Nicky’s face, but the second time was much more interesting." Thank you so much for the great prompt!
> 
> there are fics i am obsessive about historical accuracy on and then there is the 20k anachronistic comedy universe and i think it’s pretty obvious which one this falls into. enjoy.

That was the first time Joe drew Nicky’s face- fast-fading evening light and the first flickers of a campfire, and the shadows against the lines of his nose and cheekbones stretching and lengthing even in the fast movement of Yusuf’s charcoal against the back of a map, the sudden twitching in his fingers, feeling that he had to do this, here, but this man on paper, know his face by the lines of it the same way he had known all that were dear to him. Something stabbing in his heart that he both did and did not know the name of, new and hard edged, but washed in an easy and growing affection- that he could admit to. That was the first time he drew Nicolo’s fact, and Nicolo looked at the sketch for a long, long time before he rolled it and put it in the saddle bag. 

“So that is how I look,” he said simply. “In your eyes.” A conditional. Yusuf didn’t question him further. 

THe secone time was far more interesting. 

Wanted. FILTHY FRANK- VENETIAN, Yusuf scribbles, purposefully making a few spelling errors for authenticity sake. A LARGE NUMBER OF DIRHAMS FOR THE MAN, DEAD OR ALIVE. 

Nicolo is critical of the work. 

“I think I should look more evil. What is the crime i am to be convicted of?” 

“Cabbage theft.” 

“And the constabulary will bring me in for that?” 

“It was a lot of cabbages.” 

Yusuf gives the drawing some x-d out eyes and a more murderous expression. It’s hard making Nicolo look like this. Nicolo will never look like this, but, well- the portrait artists doing WANTED signs usually don’t have too much formal education. 

“I like this.” 

Yusuf puts on the stolen city watch uniform and tacks it in the heard of the souq the next morning with all the other WANTED posters, where, the next morning, said FILTHY FRANK - VENETIAN will wander into the heart of city, and find himself arrested. 

“You’re sure about this? About how to do it?” 

Nicolo nods. 

“Get arrested, break out, kill mininum of guards- preferably, none at all. Second floor is women’s holdings, and that’s where there’s a woman who’s been accused by her husband of a crime she didn’t commit. Break her out and take her back to her sister’s house.” 

“Good.” Yusuf nodds. This is simple. This is fine. This is what they DO, or are good at doing, at least, or, more like, TRYING to be good at doing. Helping people out. Being swords for justice. Doing better. They’ve got one particularly unusual talent apiece for not dying, and they better be good at it. They haven’t even died the last couple projects. He’s kind of forgotten what it felt like, and worse- what if felt like to watch Nico die, which isn’t something he should worry about, really, because he kind of has a grudging respect for the bastard, and wants him to be happy, or at least not dead, even though he still hates him a lot, and that feeling sure is mutual. “I’ll be waiting outside the prison with the horses.” 

These are some talents that the scrabbling street kid will always be better at than the merchant’s son: climbing walls, breaking out of places, and looking over his shoulder. Just like there are the things that Yusuf is consistently better at, like dealing with people, bartering, dealing with people, arguing out of scrapes, dealing with people, fine calligraphy in three traditions, and also, dealing with poeple. It’s good. They’re very smart and are working out a way to Deal With Each other by a means effective for the good of all. 

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” Yusuf suddenly blurts out. “What if the capture you for real and you can’t get out alive and something happens to you?” 

“Mhmm.” Nico says. He’s focused on toasting some bread over the fire, very pointedly not looking at him. “We’ve done this before. Baghdad. Basra.” 

“You got stabbed in Basra, and the Lepeord disaster in Baghdad-”

“Also we’ve got better at this since The Leapord Disaster. Dealt with the corrupt cistern owner and neither of us even died once.” Nico passes him some bread and white cheese and olives, the bread, of course, perfectly toasted, which is annoying, because he still toasts the bread perfectly even when they’re fighting, which is even more irritating somehow. “If I die, I’ll come back for you. I promise I won’t leave you alone.” 

Something stabs inside Yusuf’s heart. Oh, there’s a name for it, but he won’t be thinking about it now. 

“Just-” he lets it hang in the heir. “I can’t stop you from being a martyr.” I can’t, because I’d so the same in your situation. I would and I have and I will, and do it all in good faith, because that’s the life we’ve been given. But it doesn’t stop it from hurting, every fucking time. 

Nico looks at him suddenly. All deep eyes. “No. You can’t. And I can’t stop you from walking in a court of snakes and backstabber and poisoners because you think you might be able to do some good somewhere, and we’ve had enough deaths to know that we’ll come back again. But God is gracious. It is not yet your time or mind.” He reaches out to unbuckle the saddle bags and pull out an extra blanket. “It’s going to be cold tonight and your shivering teeth are very distracting to my sleep.” 

There’s only a few feet of space between them that night. Nico sleeps with a knife under his head, which started out as some kind of threat but now feels more ritualistic as he noticably twirls it between his fingers in the night, letting the the firelight glint off. Now there’s some showmanship, a joke. A promise, against what may lie in the night. 

“Goodnight, my hated enemy. I will not let anyone kill you before I get the chance.” 

“If that’s your idea of a joke, your humour is more awful than your swordsmanship. My most abhorred foe, i will be angry if you do not survive the night so as to destroy swordsmanship in the morning. 

The night is large and the silence is loud. 

“Yusuf,” Nico says suddenly. “I will always come back to you. And what’s the worst they can do to me? Kill me?”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @tovezza on tumblr and prompts and requests are always open!
> 
> Any songs, in any language or style, you'd consider completely necessary for Quỳnh's Music History Playlist? LMK!


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